Many manufacturing operations (e.g. the manufacture of aircraft) require the drilling of a large number of holes in varying sizes. Drill bits are used until they become dull and then they are resharpened. In a typical aircraft manufacturing plant, it is necessary to resharpen an extremely large number of drills each week. By way of example, approximately fifty thousand used drill bits are resharpened each week by The Boeing Company in a facility in Auburn, Wash.
The used drill bits are cleaned and sorted before being resharpened. In the past, the sorting operation has been a manual process requiring a number of people (e.g. eight) to perform rough sorting and final sorting activities. In the manual process, cleaned drill bits are deposited onto a conveyor which moves them past two or three people who manually remove the drill bits from the conveyor and separate them into rough sort categories (e.g. 20-25 categories). The drill bits are then hand carried to final sort areas where additional personnel (e.g. five to six people) manually identify and place the drill bits into species bits. In the aforementioned Auburn facility of The Boeing Company, the drill bits to be sorted comprise over six hundred types. A principal object of the present invention is to provide a method and apparatus for separating entangled drill bits or like articles and moving them onto a conveyor in single file, for subsequent handling. The present invention was developed as a part of an automated drill bit sorting system which will replace the manual sorting operation presently in use. However, it is believed that the method and apparatus of this invention has utility in other systems as well, involving the handling of drill bits, or other types of elongated articles, and either manual sorting, or automatic sorting by a different system, or some other type of subsequent handling of the articles.